Little Wolves

WERGILD





As the day went on, the sun cooked up a heat so cloying even the wind lay still before it. His empty house droned like a dead phone line. Like Grizz was some kind of dog whose ears peeled back when he heard a faint calling from someone loved and gone.

There’s things you don’t know, the girl had said. Will Gunderson had kept a shack in the woods and he taken his son there if she spoke true. He believed her, but he was going to have to see with his own eyes. Grizz only believed in what he could lay his hands on. That’s why he needed to go to town, talk to the pastor. He was going to have to see the body.

After the cattle were gathered in and the fence fixed, Grizz went into the house to get cleaned up. He washed his face in the sink, rinsed out his mouth, and then eased his bladder. He paused when he went into the kitchen because Seth’s mother was ever present in this room. The kitchen table and walls and cabinets were still the same matching lime-green color that she’d painted them before Seth’s birth. Framed watercolor vistas of sugary sand beaches and glowing seas hung on the wall. Jo had hated the cold, and in the wintertime she’d sit in this room with the gas stove open, drinking chamomile tea while she worked on transcribing notes for Dr. Salverson’s office.

Someone had been here and gone; he saw right away from the cleanliness of the floor. The visitor had come while he was sleeping and whoever she was had also taken the time to sweep up dirt the sheriff’s men had tracked in from the fields and broken glass from the floor. A note on the kitchen table waited for him. He picked it up:

Do not dispair give up,

Your not alone.

Hotdish in the fridge,

Cook thirty minutes at 350.

The handwriting was unsteady, arthritic. One of the women from the Naomi Circle at church, the meddlesome old biddies. The world wasn’t ready to leave him alone; he couldn’t hide from it anymore. He crumpled the note in his fist. Grizz needed something in him to soak up the acids in his stomach, and hotdish, the food of solace in these parts, wasn’t it. He got out some saltine crackers from the cabinets and forced these down with tap water.

When he was done he threw away the note, finding that whoever had come here had also discarded the weekly paper in the trash so Grizz wouldn’t have to look at it. The lead article carried the story about his son and featured a yearbook photo from Seth’s freshman year when he still wore his hair short, the bangs chopped unevenly, his eyes slitted like he was looking into the sun. It was the year they discovered Seth had the same systemic lupus that had killed his mother at age forty, the year little wolves had come to the Fallons. Grizz couldn’t bear to look at the photo long.

Numbly, he read for the first time how the boy had stopped at the parsonage and how the pastor’s wife had not come to the door. “I was scared,” she told Edna Drooge, the coeditor of the Lone Mountain Courier. “I couldn’t see who was there, but I just felt sure something bad was about to happen.”

Grizz folded the paper and stuffed it again into the garbage. He felt a cramping along his left side and massaged the muscle. He had torn something for sure trying to take off Steve’s head with that shovel. But was it possible that what Steve said was true and that he was a friend, not an enemy? Steve served on the church council and the board of directors at the local co-op. He was the sort of man Grizz needed to keep close if he was going to understand his son’s death.

Seth’s suicide had been Grizz’s worst fear; he was such a melancholy boy, a daydreamer who sulked instead of doing his chores, but as he got older that sulking turned to anger, the anger to desperation. Grizz could almost wrap his mind around the suicide but not the sawed-off shotgun, the pockets filled with lead slugs.

He had kept Seth’s bedroom door shut since that night. A shut door meant anything could still be inside there. Seth hadn’t left any note or any clues so far as he knew, but maybe the men hadn’t known where to look.

Grizz climbed the stairs and opened the door to a chaotic scene. The sheriff’s men had torn open the drawers of Seth’s desk and dresser and left them askew. On the floor his T-shirts and jeans pooled in piles, and his bed sheets were still dimpled with the outline of his body, a faint dark impression. It felt like trespassing.

Deer antlers, polished by years of sun, were embedded along the inlaid shelves of one south-facing wall. Seth had gathered the antlers as a boy, when he was a wanderer, when Grizz had hounded him about landmarks, keeping the house in sight, and avoiding the deep limestone crevices up in the hills where a body might fall inside and never be found again.

That boy kept him up at nights. And sometimes when Grizz did sleep, his jaw ached in the morning from grinding teeth, worrying on him. Once Seth had left a collection of women’s bras and panties dangling from the antlers as a taunt, some with rust-colored stains lining the silk. All the sizes had been different, though Grizz had tried not to look too closely. Women’s things, delicate and lace fringed, maybe some from girls at the high school. Only way the boy could have had them was if he had stolen them from houses in town. A creep.

“Where’d you get these?” Grizz asked that evening. He sat in his recliner, the offending articles piled on the floor below him.

Seth just looked away. He was not a handsome boy, tall and slump shouldered, as though apologizing to the world for being made so big. This had been a few weeks after Grizz had found the pot in his sock drawer and called Will Gunderson to arrest his own child. He didn’t know what to do with him anymore, couldn’t control Seth.

“I need to know I can trust you. Tell me the truth, now. Whose are these?”

“I see you’ve been in my room.”

“Where did you get these?”

“Found ’em,” Seth said, shrugging. He met Grizz’s gaze. “You going to turn them over to the sheriff, too?”

“Should I?”

Seth swallowed his grin. “No.” A shadow passing over his features.

“Why would you keep such things?”

His eyes had gone back to mapping the floorboards. “It was a dare.”

“A dare? To do what? Who dared you? Did Kelan put you up to this?”

Seth raised his head, his eyes blazing. “F*ck you,” he said. When Grizz stood he was still bigger than his son, but if they fought the outcome was no longer sure. Seth lowered his head and came toward him but turned at the last second, only brushing past him as he went up the stairs. A moment later his door slammed, and then his stereo came on: electric guitars, a blast of drums, a voice wailing from the speakers.

A dare? His best friend had been Kelan Gunderson, the sheriff’s older boy. Kelan was a lanky, handsome child, black haired with long-lashed gray eyes the girls all swooned over. Unlike Seth, Kelan was well liked, a congenial kid who put on a smiling face for all the adults, but Grizz always had the feeling he had egged Seth on. Kelan had a tagalong little brother, too, a boy with what the unkind called mongoloid features. The brother was always practicing spastic karate moves while trying to defend himself from the bigger boys and so they took to calling him Odd Lee instead of his given name of Bruce and the name stuck. Now he thought of Kelan and his little brother out there grieving their father, likely as mystified as Grizz, and he regretted thinking meanly of them. His son had murdered his best friend’s father. His only friend.

He stood looking at Seth’s closet door, hung with a poster of the Four Horseman charging out of red clouds, a city below them in flames, the words JUDAS PRIEST at the top and NOSTRADAMUS at the bottom. He tore the poster from its Scotch-tape moorings, picked up the scattered cassette tapes and survival magazines, because these things were not his son. As he gathered them in a garbage bag for the burn pile, his eyes were drawn to papers scattered on the desk. They were drawings mostly, wolves and strange giants in a far, frozen country. The boy had a fine hand for sketching. A creature with its arm torn off howled in the woods. In another, a child looked into a pond, but his watery reflection turned monstrous and fanged. A final one showed a hallway clotted with bloody bodies, a woman’s severed head lolling on the floor. The sheriff’s men hadn’t taken these papers; there was no need with Seth dead.

When Grizz picked them up, he saw something that caught his breath. Seth had gouged a single word into the desk: WERGILD. The wounds in the wood were fresh, dark walnut surface peeled to show blond wood underneath. Seth had worked at this recently with a knife, prying up the slivers carefully. Grizz didn’t know what the word meant but knew someone who did. It was time he got ready to head into town.

He ripped the bandages from his palms, scrubbed the wounds clean, then put on fresh blue jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, steel-toed boots he favored while driving loads for the co-op or taking trips to town, and then pulled his cap low to shade his eyes before setting out.

He drove the winding stretch of road between his farm and town, his hands light on the wheel. He’d driven past the church for many years without stopping, but today he parked out front. Grizz checked the office down the hall for the pastor, his hollow greeting echoing. It figured. He went into the sanctuary, where it was so quiet he could hear a few pigeons cooing up in the bell tower.

On a hunch he stepped through a side door, saw the path that went over to the parsonage, and almost ran right into a woman standing in the grass in her bare feet. She was staring off toward the cemetery, a single piece of paper in her hand. She had long auburn hair and was wearing a billowy blouse and skirt that could not disguise her pregnancy. She startled when she heard the door clamp shut and saw him come toward her.

He took off his cap as he approached. The way she stood, on the balls of her feet, it was as if she was preparing to run. Like she thought he was going to hurt her.

“You’re the pastor’s wife.”

She nodded, her face ashen. The wind whipped her curly hair in front of her face.

“He around?”

She shook her head, no. The same relentless wind snatched the paper from her grasp and sent it tumbling across the lawn and into the cemetery where it was lost among the graves. “F*ck,” she said, the very first word he’d heard her speak, and then brought up her hands over her mouth as though to cover the profanity.

At that moment he also noticed the missing fingers on her left hand. It had bothered Seth, he remembered. His boy had come home telling about the new teacher, a mystery. “When is he coming back?”

Her eyes darted between Grizz and the place where the paper had vanished. What had she been holding? “He has a service at the nursing home. I think. Probably return in an hour, unless he has visits.”

“You know who I am?”

She met his gaze. “You’re Seth Fallon’s dad. Logan’s been trying to reach you.”

“I wasn’t ready to talk before now. Are you okay? You look about ready to puke.”

“That paper I was holding? Someone left it at my door.” She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. “It was a drawing your son made for my class. Did you see anyone else around here?”

The look he gave her must have showed his confusion. She shut her eyes briefly and drew in a heavy breath. “I’m Clara Warren. Seth’s English teacher.” Tentatively, she held out her hand, and he took it. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Fallon.” Her hand felt smooth and hot within his own. She held on a moment too long, maybe feeling the wounds in his palm and reading some story from the touch. He jerked his hand away and then felt embarrassed of his foolishness. Her eyes were bright and amber colored. She had sharp features, her small nose twitching as if scenting something troubling in the air. A petite woman, despite her pregnancy. Grizz loomed over her.

“What was on the drawing?” He thought of the ones on the boy’s desk. The monster in the woods. The woman’s severed head.

“A wolf,” she said. “He’d written something in runes on the bottom about no one being spared.” She rushed on, nervous. “We were studying Beowulf in class, just finishing up a unit. It might not have meant anything.”

Grizz fanned the air with his cap. “He liked your class.” It was the only class Seth had spoken about once school started.

She smiled faintly, and her eyes filled. “I know.”

They were alone, the cemetery behind them, hidden from any traffic on the street by the big two-story parsonage. “Why didn’t you go to the door, then?”

“I didn’t know it was him. I didn’t know who was there.”

“Had he threatened you before this?”

“It was only a feeling,” she said.

“The same feeling you have now?” He was tired of it, the way people looked at him, shrank from his size. Tired of being feared. A weariness Seth must have felt as well.

She raised her chin and studied Grizz. “No. I know you’re not going to hurt me, Mr. Fallon.” Then she wiped her hands along her skirt and peered into his eyes.

Grizz stepped back. It was the expression on her face, open, expectant. He was afraid she was going to hug him, and he didn’t want her to do any such thing. He needed to hold on to his anger, see this to the end. “There’s something else,” he said. “He carved a word in his desk. It doesn’t look like English. ‘Wergild,’ or something. You know what it means?”

After a moment, she nodded. “It’s Old English. A blood debt, that’s what it means. It’s a price a family paid to keep others from taking revenge. Gold for blood spilled.”

“Why would he write that, then do what he did?”

She was quiet while she thought about it. He saw this and knew he would trust her. Her hands were around her stomach, as though to soothe the baby inside her. “Maybe he wanted someone to stop him.”

He set his cap on his head, not wanting her to see his eyes. It was clear to him what she had to offer. This woman had liked his son. She had not hated him the way the rest of the town had. Even now she was not judging him. “Do you think he really meant to kill a whole bunch of people like they’re saying?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Only Seth knows.”

He turned and walked to his truck.

“Mr. Fallon,” she called after him.

“It’s Grizz,” he said, facing her once more. “What everyone calls me.”

“Grizz, would you like to come inside the parsonage and wait for my husband there? I’ll make tea. Maple tea. It’s a secret recipe my father taught me.”

“No,” he said. “I’ll come another time.”